Things I did today

 Today's productivity email discussed How to Finish Projects - and the answer could be: Make your deadline shorter. After all, a task will take as much time as you give it, so give it less time. While that sounds good for some tasks (or else you get stuck in the "it's 90% perfect, I can tweak it just a little more..." phase) I definitely didn't meet my shorter deadline for a creative project today. Meant to get it done at 7pm, and I finally finished it at 9:15. Instead, I have 10 minutes to finish this blog. I did finish buying plane tickets for the 2024 solar eclipse, so that is quite exciting! Oh, one of the tips from the email is to shorten the deadline by 25%-50%. As I've been writing this post for 7 minutes already, I'd better quit and try again tomorrow.

This time, the productivity email about the 5 minute method came at an opportune time! The 5 minute method boils down to "If you're procrastinating on a task, set a timer for 5 minutes and do that task for just 5 minutes, then you can quit." However, in most cases, you won't want to quit until you get to a natural stopping point or at the completion of the task. Gee, the 5 minute method plus the 3-3-3 (or my 1-3-3) method seems to be quite the winner.  So, I did: Three Maintenance Tasks Unloaded the dishwasher Tidied my desk Made the bed Three Shorter Tasks Played piano Took a half hour walk Put air in my tires Three (one) hours of work: Finished Data Connections in Power BI, then had 20 minutes left of my hour, so I started Deploying and Managing Assets in Power BI.  I was so close to the end of the track, I decided to finish it after lunch, and now I have a DataCamp certification of Data Analyst in Power BI! That looks great! I was able to find other resources on Da...

 Apparently, if you try to write daily in a blog when you're 24, falter after a few months, try again at 34 and make it an entire year (though I had to take a break for a few weeks then write several posts per day to catch up) then write sporadically for the next 3 years, you eventually get to 600! It seems more anticlimactic and almost accidental. Oh well. Maybe I'll be better planned when I get to 700. Today was great. I did manage to get one of my own projects done! The rest of the time was devoted to supporting others. And when I say 'rest of the time', I mean it. I started working at 6:45am to prep for a production deployment and didn't stop doing support tasks or attending meetings (I had only three today) until 12:20, where I made a sandwich for lunch. In the middle of making the sandwich, I was contacted to help with another issue, so I helped while eating lunch. After it was solved and I was thinking about taking a break, another person requested assistance...

 What a day to get the "20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. You should work on that 20%!" reminder. Sounds nice, but I also work in IT support, so I don't get to ignore people in order to get my 20% going. Today was full of meetings and fixes and other support calls. Not a big deal, after all, I did sign up for this job, but hilarious to get that type of advice today  from the Productivity Challenge. I do feel accomplished, however. I was able to be an effective problem solver for both myself and my coworkers, but I wasn't able to finish any of my own projects. Ali Abdaal did mention that we often do tasks that while are important, aren't urgent and possibly won't get us closer to our goals. That's true. I did take a little time today when I found out that W2s are available to plug the values in a tax return calculator to see if I did a good job estimating my tax burden for the year. I really didn't need to do that, as it doesn't matte...

 Today's activity seemed a bit less than. I'm to reflect on the actions I took last week and decide if they got me closer to my goals. Seeing as I only got to deciding my goals and getting proper quarterly milestone four days ago, I suppose the answer to that is yes, I'm getting closer to the goals I just set, by setting them. Is this for the people who slacked off last week? Today's progress: I finished the first chapter in the next Power BI course, Data Connectors in Power BI. I grabbed the result set from running sp_blitz in QA this morning. I played piano, getting to page 126 in Alfreds Adult Learner 1. I did 15 minutes of PT. Better, but not as much as I should.  I would still call today a win. 

Yesterday's email discussed time tracking, along with some suggestions of apps I could use for live continuous tracking. I'm not a big fan of active time tracking apps, especially when put on a company computer, so as much as I like the idea of just going about my day and it tracks how much I slack off (or not, maybe, but probably yes) I'm not going to do that. I will, though, track completion of tasks. Let's head back to the top 5 goals with my week 1 tasks and see where I am: Week 1 : Become a certified Power BI Data Analyst Quarter 1: Finish Power BI Skill Track and do exercises in The Definitive Guide to DAX Finish Report Design in Power BI Have a similar level of fitness as my exercise partner Quarter 1: Create daily PT exercises habit 75% of daily exercises as scheduled for PT Achieve intermediate level playing for piano Quarter 1: Play through all of Alfred's Adult Learner 1 and learn five fakebook songs Play the first 20 pages of Alfred Adult Learner 1 Cook ...

 The goal for today is to create an ideal week that reflects on the goals you've identified. Phase 1 is the Ideal Ordinary Week currently, and Phase 2 considers what an Ideal Ordinary Week will look like in the future, 1 or 3 years from now. Phase 2 can consider what you'd like to change, but don't see it happening anytime soon. I tried this exercise before, but found it not very useful - however, I didn't pair it with a top 5 goals for the year, Knowing me, I probably expected myself to magically want to do something for an hour, like practice piano, when it wasn't until college that I liked playing piano for hours. Ali Abdaal also mentions that it doesn't have to match your current schedule or that you have to immediately adhere to it. That's probably what I didn't consider a consistent tweaking between what you do now and where you would like to be for your idea goal. The faster you do the new schedule, the faster you get through your goals - however,...